Bing Ads: The Ultimate Tutorial for Businesses

With Google controlling the majority share of online traffic, it’s easy to write off Bing as a PPC platform, but Bing Ads has enormous potential for businesses of all sizes– especially those with smaller budgets.

Bing Ads presents a fantastic opportunity to generate search leads at relatively lower cost, and that’s something all advertisers should take note of.

In this post, we’re going to take you through everything you need to know about Bing Ads, including how they work, how to set up your ad account, and how to get started on your first campaign.

What Are Bing Ads?

Bing Ads are a pay-per-click platform, and are essentially the equivalent to Google Ad’s search ads or display ads (the latter of which is called “audience ads” on Bing).

Here’s how they work in a nutshell:

You create a campaign targeting a group of keywords, and when users search for those specific phrases, your ad bids on a chance to show up in one of the top sponsored placements for maximum visibility.

Bing Ads are valuable because, like Google, they’re able to capture users who are actively researching or considering a purchase.

You can grab these users while they’re researching, tossing your name in the hat and giving your business a chance to land them as a customer.

Bing Ads are incredibly effective, and they give you a great shot to reach hyper-specific audiences looking for exact terms that you’re targeting.

Before You Create Your Campaigns…

There’s one crucial thing that you need to do first if you haven’t done it already, and that’s setting up your conversion tracking pixel.

This tracking pixel lets you see what users do on your site after they click on an ad, and are essential for accurately tracking conversions.

If you’re already familiar with tracking pixels through Facebook or Google, just make sure you’ve got this up and running before you skip to the next section.

If not, here’s what you need to do:

Head to the dashboard, and find “conversion tracking.” You’ll choose “Create a UET tag,” and then name it accordingly.

Copy the snippet of code created for you.

Paste this snippet of code onto the pages on your site that you want to track. You can use a WordPress plugin like Insert Headers and Footers Plugin to do this quickly and automatically.

You can add conversion goals to each tag so that you can determine what you want to target.Verify that your pixel is working before you start running your campaigns. It can take up to 24 hours for the pixel to register.

How to Create Your Bing Ads Campaign

When you first log into your Bing account, you’ll immediately see the ads dashboard. Here, you can create, manage, review, and edit both your search and audience ads.

To get started, choose “Create campaign.”

Your first step will be to choose a goal. You can choose from:

Visits to your site

Visits to your brick and mortar location

Conversions

Phone calls

Dynamic search ads, which customizes the ads based on the content of your site, no keywords needed

Selling catalog products, which allows you to rank in the Shopping tab on the side of the search results with images of your products

For this example, we’ll choose the site visits objective.

Create Your Bing Ads Campaign Step 1: Campaign Settings

Next, you’re going to set your campaign settings, including the name and budget for your campaign.

You can choose from an individual daily budget, or use a budget from the Shared library.

You’ll then set a location, which can be broad like Canada and the US or specific zip codes, along with who you want to see your ads.

Choose the languages of people who see your ad, along with whether you want people who are searching for target locations or people who are there.

Create Your Bing Ads Campaign Step 2: Ad Groups & Keywords

At the second stage, you’ll choose to create ad groups by selecting your keywords.

Note that for search ads, it’s always a good choice to create tightly-knit, small ad groups with a limited number of relevant keywords. This makes it easier to write relevant copy for the terms in the ad group, which can increase your ad rank and performance.

If I was going to run Bing Ads for my business, I’d have one ad group for content marketing, one for PPC copy, and one for ghostwriting. They’re all services I offer, but they’re distinct, and they’re best in ad groups of their own.

While I always recommend doing keyword research before creating your campaigns, sometimes the keyword suggestion tool on the right will offer some great ideas for high value, affordable keywords you can add to the list.

Create Your Bing Ads Campaign Step 3: Campaign Settings

Here, you’ll create the actual ad, including writing up the copy and adding site link extensions.

When you’re creating the ad, notice that you get 30 characters for each of the three title sections and 90 characters for both ad texts.

There are dividers between the titles, so you need to treat each title as unique instead of one long run on sentence.

You’ll also see that you can add in URLs and mobile-specific URLs; use both if needed.

(Also please never write copy this horrendous. If you need help with that, check out our guide here.)

Next, choose if you want to add extensions to your ad.

If you’re unfamiliar with Google, extensions give you more room to make your offer or business more appealing to users, and it helps you stand out visually in the SERPs.

Furthermore, extensions are known to increase CTR and conversion rates.

Bing Ads extensions can look like this:

Options include sitelink extensions, price extensions, callout extensions, and more. You can get a basic overview of what their Google counterparts do here.

Creating sitelink extensions only takes a few minutes; just fill out the needed fields, and you’ll be able to add them to your ad directly.

Create Your Bing Ads Campaign Step 4: Budgets & Bid

At this last stage, you’ll want to define your campaign’s budget and your bid strategy.

When it comes to bidding strategy, enhanced CPC is a good choice if you want to let Bing do some of the automation for you, prioritizing getting as many clicks as possible for a great price.

If you’re worried about having a specific bid you can afford, on the other hand, you can choose to set a manual bid.

One thing that’s really great about Bing Ads is the customization options here.

You can set distinctive bids for each individual ad group easily, and even adjust your bid based on the user location, device, or time of day.

You can use these advanced options to increase bids for audiences who you may think could be your most high-value audiences, thus justifying the higher bids.

Conclusion

Bing Ads may not have Google’s enormous market share of online search traffic, but they definitely hold their own, especially with Yahoo as a sister company.

You can get great results at a lower cost, helping to spread your ad spend just a little farther.

This doesn’t mean that you should be focusing exclusively on Bing; most brands should consider using both Bing and Google to find the right balance between maximized reach and the highest ROI.

Google’s high market share doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use Bing, after all, but it does mean that you don’t necessarily want to ignore Google Ads as a platform altogether.

Want to learn more about running Google Ads in the meantime? Check out our resources here.

What do you think? Have you ever used Bing Ads? Do you use Bing in combination with Google Ads? Why or why not? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

Comments

Thanks for this step by step guide to bing ads. I agree bing ads are much cheaper. In fact 2 years ago when I first tried them just to get some practice with the platform, I found their support very helpful and way much better than Google ads support specialists.

Those bing ads support agent’s emailed me all the excel files that I need regarding my targeted keywords cpc data. And morever bing support works 24/7 international. I wish google ads would learn from bing ads support.

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